Perfection

"Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it."
-Salvador Dali

Are you looking for ‘Perfection’? Do you need somewhere to recycle those old dreams and pick up something new to aim for? Then never fear, you have come to the right place. McMurdo station, Antarctica may look like a kid’s lego set forgotten in the playground dust, but there is more to the duplo settlement than meets the eye.

First, there are trucks, and lots of them. I’m not doing much to dispel the myth of the base as a three year old’s heaven, but when a ute casually trundles past on triangular caterpillar tracks it’s pretty cool. The vehicles are not only square and primary coloured, they also give new meaning to the term ‘monster truck’, with wheel heights able to be measured in Hanne-lengths. I’m not THAT short!

Just in case being vertically challenged should become all too much to deal with, the Chapel of the Snows was open for reflection. Being the southern most church in the world is a coup on its CV, but the most eye catching piece of the church’s architecture is the stained glass window. Made up of bold primary colours to blend in with the surroundings, the penguin, chalice, grapes and book are deliberately ambiguous. Being blank, the book could be any religious text, The wine and bread could be the Eucharist or just friends sharing food and drink. The emperor penguin is not only native to the continent but represents personal sacrifice, with the male penguins sometimes starving to death incubating the egg and waiting for the female to return with food. In a twist of semiotics, the onus is on the viewer to provide meaning for the image.

If religion just doesn’t do it for you or if the relationship between signifier and signified just does your brain in, any unfinished soul searching can always continue in the bar. Here it is possible to sit back with a Speights and watch the ice hockey on wall mounted screens while the gaze of a wooden stag’s head bores into the back of your neck. This is the ‘metaphysical pole’ where you can while away hours wondering whether you actually exist and, if not, what keeps happening to the beers you order.

Perhaps that’s what the crate marked ‘perfection’ was all about. If everyone spent their spare time soul searching then not much praying or drinking would get done and the available facilities would not be used to maximum capacity, which really would be a crying shame. It’s far easier to box up flawlessness and leave it in an obvious location, thus sparing everyone the work of the hunt.

So, there you have it. Those who tell you to stop looking for perfection because you will never find it are wrong: photographic evidence never lies. If the plane ride to McMurdo to find the box is a little out of your league, just buy some arctic lego, throw away the polar bear, bring it down to the right hemisphere and you’re away. With the aid of a permanent marker and some philosophical pondering over what it really signifies the little white brick will do nicely…